Upgrading to vSphere in a BladeCenter environment with 15gb hd per blade

[caddo]

Hello everyone,

i have a test environment with a BladeCenter S chassis with 2 hs21 xm blades with esx 3.5 update 4 configured as a 2 node cluster. I would like to use this as a test environment for all 3 update scenarios: update manager, host update utility and fresh install.

My blades have 15gb of local drive space on a solide state dual drive, now i know the minimum suggested for COS is 8gb, 10gb raccomended but my current disk layout (from default install of esx 3.5) won't allow me to put the COS .VMDK in local storage which is something i don't like for future production upgrades scenarios. Here's my current layout:

Disk /dev/sda: 14.9 GB, 14999879680 bytes

64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 14305 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 * 1 100 102384 83 Linux

/dev/sda2 101 5100 5120000 83 Linux

/dev/sda3 5101 11680 6737920 fb Unknown

/dev/sda4 11681 14305 2688000 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/sda5 11681 12224 557040 82 Linux swap

/dev/sda6 12225 14206 2029552 83 Linux

/dev/sda7 14207 14305 101360 fc Unknown

As you can see my current local Datastore is about 6gb which is not enough. I was wondering if there is something i could do to make some room for the COS .VMDK

Another curiosity i have is what happens if i do a fresh install of vSphere? Will it be able to use this space to put the COS .VMDK locally? I assume it will since i tested vSphere on a Virtual Machine with 10gb of disk and it did work.

I hope someone can give me a hint on how to put the COS locally without a fresh install. Thank you in advance for your support.

[vmware25]

kindly disregard

Message was posted from wrong account

[oschistad]

If you are able to empty your existing local VMFS partition you may be

able to move and resize your old partitions using a gparted boot CD. if

that doesn't work you can use a linux live CD to repartition and copy

data from old to new partitions until you have a contiguous partition

of the required size for your new vmfs.

This will take a little linux know-how though

[caddo]

The problem is that i don't know which partitions i can remove or resize without damaging the esx installation, check the partition table i've pasted in the original message and let me know.

[Josh26]

You're not leaving a lot of room for yourself.

Personally, I would disconnect from the SAN, blow away the install and install ESXi - you'll have loads of space on those drives for it.

Unless you have a very complicated configuration - it doesn't take much to reconfigure your server. Just setup your network, then browse your data store and import your servers.

[oschistad · Accepted solution]

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 * 1 100 102384 83 Linux

This is the boot partition, don't touch this

/dev/sda2 101 5100 5120000 83 LinuxRoot or /var

/dev/sda3 5101 11680 6737920 fb Unknown

This is the VMFS partition. Can be deleted as long as it's empty (don't want to lose your VMs )

/dev/sda4 11681 14305 2688000 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)

Start of the extended partition. Cannot be changed unless you also move all contained partitions.

/dev/sda5 11681 12224 557040 82 Linux swap

Swap partition, referenced in /etc/fstab using either label, UUID or /dev/sda5. Can be safely messed with as long as you update fstab to point at the correct swap partition in the end

/dev/sda6 12225 14206 2029552 83 Linux

root or /var partition

/dev/sda7 14207 14305 101360 fc Unknown

vmkcore partition, not critical

My suggestion would be to try and delete the vmfs partidion, and then extend your second linux partition to be large enough to hold the contents of whatever is in /dev/sda6. Then copy this using for instance rsync, and update /etc/fstab to not mount /dev/sda6.

You should then be able to delete the entire extended partition and reuse the free space to build a new vmfs, swap and vmkcore.

Bear in mind that these are destructive operations - you may want to start by making a DD image of the entire drive to a separate location, such as a USB drive or NFS share on the network. That way you can restore the entire drive using dd if=backup of=/dev/sda if you need to.

[caddo]

Thanks oschistad, this is a great starting point.

[psreekanth75]

Hi caddo,

Thanks for your interest in VMware vSphere 4.0

This upgrade scenario is not supported by VMware i.e upgrading to VMware vSphere 4.0 with 6GB available space on local VMFS datastore

Regards

Sreekanth